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Trudeau’s 'open government' initiative encouraging: electoral reform advocate

Trudeau’s 'open government' initiative encouraging: electoral reform advocate

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s broad policy announcement Tuesday is music to the ears of electoral reform advocates and for those who believe the first-past-the-post voting system is an unfair way for Canadians to cast votes.

Kelly Carmichael, executive director of Fair Vote Canada, told Yahoo Canada News that the organization is very encouraged by the Liberal Party’s plans to end first-past-the-post at the federal level.

The current system badly distorts voters’ choices, allowing a party to win the majority of seats in the House of Commons with less than 40 per cent of the vote, and delivering wildly different seat counts to parties that win similar shares.

Trudeau announced that the party would strike a special all-party parliamentary committee to study other electoral systems and make recommendations to Parliament, bringing in electoral reform legislation within 18 months of forming a government.

Fair Vote Canada is a national, multi-partisan campaign to change the way Canadians vote, at all levels of government. Carmichael said proportionality is key and that there are many ways and different systems to make that happen.

“The Liberal statement says that they will look at ranked ballots, proportional representation and mandatory voting. So they’re going to look at everything,” Carmichael said.

“We want all first votes to count,” she added. “We want a system that will provide good governance, and not just a ballot on election day. So there are a whole bunch of systems that we would be happy with.”

The Liberal statement also noted that online voting would be part of the parliamentary study.

Trudeau’s announcement comes amid a decline in fortunes for the Liberal Party. The NDP, under Leader Tom Mulcair, has been doing well in the polls, seeing a real surge in support across the country. Many liken the shifts in public sentiment to the NDP’s stance against the federal government’s controversial anti-terror legislation, Bill C-51, that’s set to become law this week.

Poll results released by Angus Reid on Tuesday put Mulcair statistically in a neck-and-neck tie with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, at Trudeau’s expense. It seems Canadians are seriously considering Mulcair as their next prime minister and as a legitimate alternative to Harper.

The broad range of policies and open government initiatives announced Tuesday, using the slogan “real change,” is seen as an attempt by the Liberals to fend off the collapse in support and try to convince progressives to vote red instead of orange on Oct. 19.

Reforms Liberals want to see range from changing question period in the House, to making major amendments to the Access to Information Act, to creating gender parity on any Liberal cabinet to exploring electoral reform.

Mulcair has promised to implement proportional representation if the NDP form a government and Dippers in Ottawa didn’t take Trudeau’s policy promises with much ease.

Many claimed hypocrisy on the part of the Liberal leader who has voted against electoral reform initiatives in the House and accused Trudeau and the Liberals of lifting NDP slogans — the classic “Ottawa is broken” line that Jack Layton campaigned on during the last federal election, for example — for the announcement.

Carmichael is glad the conversation around electoral reform is advancing, however, and not just about the need for reform but about how such a thing would or could be implemented.

“It’s certainly moving forward,” she said.

“The fact that they’re going to include implementation in [the policy, means], they’re starting to really listen and understand that Canadians are just itching for better democracy.”

With files from The Canadian Press